


wait for me, i'll be coming slower down

by rensshi



Category: NCT (Band), WayV (Band)
Genre: Brief Hendery/Shuhua, Character Study, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Hendery-centric, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Slice of Life, WayV - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 08:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17863466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensshi/pseuds/rensshi
Summary: Hendery counts in pairs, and Ten is a constant.To add to that, it's not all that sentimental. Preserving the memory of Ten’s even breathing next to Hendery as he slept, and the blue striped umbrella on rainy days though,mightcount as sentimental.





	wait for me, i'll be coming slower down

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from [warm blood](https://open.spotify.com/track/6Rp79bGrzD8cWUGE1eiL8s?si=ZrvYqJgvQuOsQjdZNlqgSQ) by flor 
> 
> to clarify, the roman numerals at the beginning of most parts are segmented into different "chapters" of hendery's life, if you want to call it that? the story isn't in a linear timeline, and keeps jumping back and forth so hope it helps!

i.

The first time Hendery looks at a celestial sky, he’s fourteen, in the national observatory that his grandma brings him to. He looks up past the planets and moves on to the Milky Way, a scattered burst across the high ceiling. Hendery is reminded of rocket ships.

For as long as Hendery has known Ten back when his family moved into the unit down the hallway in their flat when Hendery was nine years old, Ten has never had a problem with heights. There’s a ridiculous incident where Ten, already in secondary school, climbed the school flagpole and rightfully got detention for it. When he came by Hendery’s place after school on that day, he at least had the decency to blush a deep red when Hendery brought it up to his parents.

“At least the view was cool!” Ten said, smiling, his voice having reached that weird nasal, timbre that deepened last year while Hendery was still waiting for puberty to strike himself. Hendery had been busy shredding apart dried cuttlefish between his teeth when Ten dropped a piece of paper on his lap—the pencil lines detailed a robot and a rocket shooting skywards to another planet, with two figures visible.

“This is us,” Ten had told him. He’d doodled it in class apparently before climbing the pole. “You’re the one in the robot, and I made it fly for you.”

“Doesn’t make a difference, we’re both flying anyway,” Hendery said but he grinned at Ten. The robot had a stylized ‘H’, which was cool. Hendery coloured it in with pink, blue and black that day while Ten finished the packet of dried cuttlefish.

Now, Hendery assembles the Gundam figure an uncle gave him for Christmas on the table, and Ten is lying on his bed, spindly pale legs propped up against the wall while his head’s tipping off the bedside so he speaks to Hendery upside down. “I don’t know how you have the patience for that,” Ten drawls, squinting at Hendery’s busy hands.

“I don’t know how _you_ have the patience to finish art projects,” Hendery says, glancing over at him. Ten doesn’t say anything, but his face pulls into a weird grimace before his face settles into the curled smile. There’s a small watercolour painting in a frame that Hendery has against a shelf, a soft juxtaposition beside the flashy Rubiks cube and the One Piece figurines. The painting is of a robot’s helmet, filled with succulents and fish. Ten painted it for him as a late birthday present between the years of growing up together, sheepishly handed to Hendery despite how cocky and ambitious Ten can get when he defies everything his art teachers say and uses a 4B pencil right away before the H pencils.

Xiaojun just thinks it’s how Ten is. “He never works hard on the drawings I ask him to do. I feel like you’re one of the only people he actually listens to, you know,” Xiaojun says, with his eyebrows pinched together during recess when he sees another page of Hendery’s notebook covered with the city skyline and signed with Ten’s delicate scrawl.

“Maybe it’s because you never actually compliment him?” Hendery suggests as he shells out coins to get food from the canteen.

“He _needs_ complimenting?” Xiaojun shoots him a look of disbelief and Hendery laughs.

Hendery keeps all his H pencils in his art classes, because it’s just more logical to erase mistakes if they’re hardly seen.

 

 

ii

Hendery used to count while listening to his own breathing to fall asleep. Sometimes when Ten slept over during Christmas he’d count in time to his breaths. Not that he could help it because Ten breathed really loud. Hendery’s envious—maybe it was all the physical extracurricular activities Ten kept trying out at school before he got bored. If Hendery wasn’t counting between breathing, it was listening to the wall clock tick until the sound drilled into his head, deafening and ominous. He had trouble getting up for school for a while. The ticking was a constant reminder of the hours going by until he’d be groggy from a dreamless sleep, and stumbling out of bed to get under the shower under the push of his sister yelling _Kunhang, hurry up, mom is mad_. During the school vacation though, the rise and fall of Ten’s slumbering form next to him eases up the insomnia. This is probably how Hendery started the habit of counting in pairs.

Before Hendery turns fifteen, on the 28th of September, he goes up to the top level of his flat at sundown and watches the grey sky from there on the windowsill, and a Faye Wong song floats through a tenant’s open window below. The metal door creaks some ways behind him, and Ten appears.

“You’re gonna get in trouble again,” Ten tells him, his brows are creased together. “You’re always losing track of time up here,” he says.

“Speak for yourself,” Hendery says, fidgeting as Ten stands next to him, elbows bumping when they’re squeezed in the narrow windowsill. The maintenance man wouldn’t be up here until past six. When they look down over sprawling urban patchwork of smooth concrete and chipped rooftops through the smog, the smell of rain hits first before it starts pouring.

 

 

 

It’s a growing pain when Hendery finds out that the contagious cheerfulness he gets from Qian Kun passing him sweets in the mornings when they run into each other waiting for the elevator of the flat, is something that warrants sly teasing from Ten.

“Candy has never made you that happy,” Ten grins, his voice lilting. Hendery tries to imagine twisting Ten’s arm _just_ hard enough to wipe the smirk off his face, but his brain blacks out the image and he just laughs. He tries to offer Ten the extra candy, but he refuses.

 

 

i.

There’s the near invisible coffee stain in one of Hendery’s uniform pants, entirely Ten’s fault for being clumsy. Not that it matters, because their trousers were a dark blue. His pants would get soaked during the rainy season if Ten didn’t stubbornly pull Hendery under the safety of his blue striped umbrella when he wanted to run home in the drizzle. The streets would be wet and slippery, their socks would be damp, and the smoke from hawkers’ carts and stalls would only impair his vision if the rain started pouring.

Every time, Ten has to lock him in place with a hand over his slight shoulders so Hendery doesn’t wander off first. Even in the rain and the commotion that comes with rushing pedestrians past them knocking umbrellas, Ten’s small hands are cold compared to the warmth of his side through the mist and chilly wind.

 

 

ii.

Hendery doesn’t like the idea of broken things. His dad would salvage the parts of a clock, and he’d be able to fix it, until it stops again. For the longest time, there’s a broken clock that Hendery thinks about on occasion. The clock is one of those twin bell alarm clocks, the analog hands soundless and unmoving on Ten’s desk.

“Do you want it? You know how to fix it,” Ten said, revolving slowly in his computer chair. He kept his eyes on Hendery, the amusement clearly there. He’s long abandoned his essay—some assignment on anthropology—that Hendery can’t help him with because he’s just started IB.

It feels like total irony when two weeks later, Hendery fractures his left hand when he tries to save himself from falling hard on wet asphalt because of a speeding reckless motorist. Luckily he isn’t left-handed.

Ten visits him on days that he isn’t drowning in homework while Hendery has a cast. There’s a point where Hendery falls asleep, and in his drifting state, Ten says something to him that he can’t remember. But Hendery does remember him pressing his lips against his cast over his wrist, and then the crown of his hair, the way Ten kisses the head of his pet beagle, Leo.

The only reason why Hendery doesn’t hate storms and typhoons at this point is because of this.

And what happens after his bad hand: At school, a girl in the year below signs her name on his cast, nearly scribbling over Ten’s sharpie drawing of a donkey next to his message of _prayers you’ll stop being a klutz sometime soon_. Long after his hand has healed, this girl, Shuhua, kisses him on the cheek behind the science labs after school. Hendery has never been this scared before but he thinks it’s because Shuhua is fearless, and he’s not.

On the last page of her journal decorated with washi tape is a bucket list of cities written in pink pen. Tokyo, Guangzhou, and Barcelona were all crossed out already. Amsterdam, Singapore, and Seoul had little circles next to them. No stars of importance, nor wobbly hearts. “It’s a work in progress. We—people—we’ve got time,” Shuhua explains.

Time. The moving clockwork of city life seen from the top level of his flat. Contrary to what Ten said long before, Hendery is good at keeping track of time.

 

 

 

 

Shuhua does mini portraits and rough still life when she’s bored. For someone who was in the science track with Hendery, she drank in what little of art history books there were in the school library the way Xiaojun could consume classic literature and the Percy Jackson series.

“Did Ten ever draw a portrait of you?” Shuhua asks, peering at the watercolor painting of the robot helmet in his room.

“He’s not like that,” Hendery says, squinting at one of the ceiling corners as he tries to imagine Ten being patient enough to draw a portrait. Neither of them would survive for very long staying still like that. “He’s not sentimental.” He says nothing more.

Shuhua chuckles, her hair falling behind her shoulders and catching the strips of sunlight through the window grilles. “You’re saying I am?”

“I think you can be.”

“Well, I’d draw you,” Shuhua says, matter-of-factly.

And she does—a quick portrait, rough enough to finish in the span of a half hour whilst Hendery pores over his homework, Yukhei’s voice ringing every now and then in the stillness of the conjoined living and dining room when he asks one of them what the answers are and Yuqi’s low patient voice responding, soft and almost languid, settling between the hum of the electric fan.

The dry afternoon heat that slips between the background noise seems to rise to his cheeks when Hendery doesn’t know what to say to the drawing, except “It’s very good.” Her gray pencil lines were soft, with the impression of the hand that drew it being featherlight and fluid. There was the tint of pink colour pencil accented to make him look rosy.

She’d be good friends with Ten as well, Hendery could see it clearly.

But there’s something about the timing of things, the passage of people weaving between narrow streets by shops and stalls on his routine walk home, dawns and sunsets, that seems almost ruthless. Ten hadn’t been home in a while, stuck slaving over college papers for the most part while Hendery is in twelfth grade.

There are no tangible seams between the passage of time, except when a weird buzz shoots from his fingers to his wrist while he’s on the phone with Ten.

“You like her,” Ten states after he sees Yukhei’s instagram update of a group picture of them, and Hendery can picture the mirth dancing in his eyes and his lips curled up in a delicate smirk on the other end of the line.

“Yeah. So?” He clears his throat. His left hand seems to grow heavier.

“Don’t be a chicken, Kunhang. Don’t!” Ten barks.

“Oh my God, who are you, my sisters?”

“No, but I probably love you more than your sisters do. Just kidding,” Ten says, and Hendery can’t help but laugh at that even as he swears at him through the phone.

He’s sure that Leo the beagle, is somewhere above Hendery on Ten’s list of people he loves, right below his parents, of course. Still not all that sentimental. Preserving the memory of Ten’s even breathing next to him as he slept, and the blue striped umbrella on rainy days though _might_ count as sentimental.

 

 

 

There’s a point where he doesn’t fall asleep as easily again.

When Ten actually comes home on some weekends to visit, Hendery counts until eight or nine, before he rings the doorbell.

Hendery still can’t really explain who Ten really is, so he lets Ten deem himself as Hendery’s best friend when Shuhua meets him for real. After all it’s why there are bits and pieces of their friendship framed and perched in corners of his bedroom: the painting, Daredevil comic issues, dried out marker pens that Ten left so long ago, and the broken clock that’s still not fixed.

He can’t throw out the clock.

 

 

 

“Hey,” Hendery nudges Xiaojun who’s sitting on the floor of the basketball court just a few blocks away from his home. “What are you supposed to say to someone who’s happy for you, but you don’t really feel as happy as they think you are?”

Xiaojun looks up from tying his shoelaces. “Um, honestly? I’d still say thanks anyway,” he says.

A motorbike honks in the distance. The flap of pigeon wings above them is its own rhythm to his pulse.

 

 

 

When Hendery closes his eyes, Shuhua would be there when he opened them, her face twisted in concern. He says it’s nothing. And then after she nods, Hendery continues counting his own steps in twos and fours, up the stairs to the rooftop of Xiaojun’s flat.

Xiaojun’s flat isn’t a high rise one, but his friends still stay within the safety boundary of the metal fences around the edges.

The summer heat burns at the back of his neck, when he looks at Shuhua.

He kisses her dry palms and knuckles and the memory of the pain in his wrist tingles beneath his own skin.

 

 

iii.

He’s wiping his brow under the warm sunshine beside Ten, who‘s reading.

“I’m still not sure if I like Jack Kerouac very much,” Ten announces, grimacing at the book he’s been buried in.

“You can always change your mind when you read it the second time round,” Hendery tells him, as he flips through his physics notes.

They’re eating fishballs while Ten is free from lectures today. The sauce drips on the pavement after Ten has already finished his iced coffee, when Hendery gets the text that confirms the precedent that Shuhua wants to break up.

“Shouldn’t you call her?” Ten asks, looking wary.

“I knew it was coming,” Hendery just responds, not really reading the message anymore after staring at it. His own voice sounds far away and disjointed.

“But still.” Ten shrugs, focused on slipping off the last fishball on the stick between his teeth.

The irritation almost punches through Hendery’s chest, but it only translates into a scowl and a heaviness growing in the hand that isn’t holding his phone. “What do you know?” He says quietly.

Ten doesn’t look at him but he shrugs again. It appeases Hendery, somehow. “I dunno,” Ten admits seriously. “I really don’t.”

Shuhua ends their relationship when she meets him in the park near school campus. She manages to smile, thin and watery because she’s always been braver than Hendery. “You’re sweet,” she murmurs, her eyes sad and so disappointed that his core aches almost violently. “But I still ask myself if I can ever really...know you. Truly know you. I think—I think we’re better off as friends.”

Silence. And then, as easily as the seams around them fell into place and made themselves visible again, Hendery agrees.

Maybe he can wrap his head around the friends part. His left wrist and hand tingle with a phantom pain as she keeps saying sorry.

The counting starts and stops. He doesn’t quite know who he is, it’s true.

 

 

 

iv.

Long ago, Xiaojun asked if Hendery ever thinks about flying and he just answered “Like Superman? Sure, doesn’t everyone?”

No one else knew about the drawing of a rocketship and a robot housing both Ten and him, stowed away in a box somewhere under his bed.

Sometimes when Hendery drifts off, he’s jolted awake by his roommate, telling him not to nap too long or else he might miss his older sister’s phone calls again.

Or, he wakes up disoriented and breathing hard in the early hours because he dreams about walking on rooftops—running—and he’s chasing Ten. When he catches up, Ten grabs on to him, hands digging into his shoulders and waist so hard as they both fall that it’s almost dizzying. Ten’s soft giddy laughter against his ear and his nose grazing his bare neck when they fall over haunt him past waking consciousness, and he has to step into a cold shower to try to make his body forget the phantom touch.

There’s a dream once where Shuhua watches them. He hasn’t dreamt about her in so long, even in the waking world, she has two lecture classes with him. In the dream, she’s sitting on the dirty pipes on top of a flat, and smiling at Hendery, until it starts raining. Her long hair hangs in ropes and her oversized white graphic tee is transparent and drenched, the outline of her black bralette underneath visible. How she manages to look like the hazy quality in Ten’s watercolour works, makes him think that there are some things that aren’t anchored to reality.

He wants to run to her, bring Ten with him, but his body doesn’t move, and then everything disappears.

He doesn’t know if the dream is supposed to mean he’s been missing something.

Today someone shakes him gently awake and in his sleep-ridden cloud that he’s on, he thinks he’s going crazy when Ten is still there in his dorm room, having taken his sweet time with arranging and organizing Hendery’s belongings that his mom had sent over.

“Hate to break it to you but,” he announces, glancing out the window. “It’s raining, and basketball with the guys is canceled. We’re staying in.”

It takes a while for Hendery to completely register what he’s saying. “Oh,” he finally whispers. “It’s okay,” he says, groaning and rolling over. “We can stay in.” He loses track of what he says when his mind floats over Ten’s profile against the window, the beating rainfall and gloomy sky doing nothing to dampen the strange light in his eyes.

“Good,” Ten smirks. His eyes look clearer than ever. “If I leave now I’ll start missing you again.”

 

 

 

Hendery watches the clock behind his professor, and the soles of his trainers tap gently against his desk in an even rhythm. Yukhei nudges him with an elbow, muttering _cut it out_ and lifts a hand in apology when their professor gives him a withering look before she drones on and Hendery bites back a giggle. In the row in front of them, Shuhua tilts her head to the side, eyebrows raised and smirks at them both.

At sundown after his last class for the day, Hendery realizes that on the way from the Physics building back to his dorm, he’s stopped counting his steps in pairs, or in beats of one two, one two, while he puts on a song through his earphones. Against the burnt peach sky and fading sunlight, the humidity clings to his skin. Later at night, Hendery would smell the rain first before the storm hits.

When his phone buzzes in his pocket, it’s Yukhei again, asking if he can help chip in for food later. Hendery stares at the text, the absence of excessive emojis suggesting other motives. Motive sounds like too sinister a word for someone like Yukhei, who means well. There’s supposed to be a get-together at Yukhei’s apartment unit later. Knowing Yukhei, it isn’t going to be a tiny close-friends-only gathering. Knowing Yukhei, who always has food covered and then backup plans courtesy of Kun, his text means that he’s trying to make sure Hendery isn’t going to back out.

The seams stitching parts of his life were clearly visible now. Hendery never liked the idea of broken things because he was scared of being the one to break them. And yet—

 _You can’t run, you know that._ That’s what Yukhei had said. Even Shuhua had pointed that out.

Hendery counts that it’s been about three weeks, since August started, and precisely three weeks and fifteen hours since he’s last spoken to Ten. Maybe he can stretch that out some more and keep counting.

 

 

 

A marketing student named Mark Lee has his birthday on the first week of August, and besides him, Hendery doesn’t really remember all of Ten’s college friends, except Johnny, a foreign exchange student from America, and Sicheng. He’s really bad with names so he lets Ten and Kun do all the talking while Yukhei bounces in and out of the conversation from Yuqi and Shuhua, to share their food with him at the hangout in Johnny’s place.

Hendery’s stomach aches from laughing too much until Ten has to put a cap on how many drinks he’s had.

Ten has admitted that Hendery is a lot smarter in some ways between them both, even if Ten worked just as hard in school and is the better learner.

So Hendery would like to think he knows what it means when Ten tells him he thinks he might be in love.

“Like the way you love Leo? Oh, oh—are you getting another dog?” Hendery asks, mimicking a petting motion with his hands, as if Ten’s beagle is there, sitting on his lap and snuggling into his hands. Ten’s grin falters and he frowns, the lights on the opposite building casting a blue and orange tint against his cheekbones and the tip of his nose as they lean against the small balcony of the top floor of Johnny’s apartment.

Hendery would like to think he knows what it means when Ten brushes his mouth against his. But he has no clue. So he does what he always did whenever Ten kept him close by huddled underneath umbrellas on rainy days. He lets Ten move closer, lips warm, nose brushing, like in those dreams. That’s when Hendery pulls away fast and stumbles back.

He can’t really hear Ten’s words through the panicked tone and through the blood pounding in his own ears.

All he wants to do is leave, close his eyes, and count. One, two, three, four, all the way up to—

After all, if you can’t fly, then run.

 

 

 

ii.

The broken clock Ten gave Hendery actually never gets fixed because Hendery kept putting off the repair in between schoolwork and hanging out with friends, Ten included, at the time.

“You could just leave it broken. I mean, no one uses alarm clocks like these anymore. But you don’t have to throw it away if you don’t want to,” Ten says, shaking the clock around as if that would magically make it work again.

Hendery leaves the hands motionless and stops making mental notes to break out his dad’s toolbox. He decides that he won’t fix it. If he makes that decision, he won’t hear the imaginary ticking anymore.

It’s like choosing to count to Ten’s breathing while he tries to fall asleep, and then choosing instead to think about rocket ships and the Milky Way. Eventually, his brain will get tired and he drifts off into space.

 

 

 

iv.

Raindrops can never be counted. Maybe that’s why Hendery can never truly hate the storms that came in the typhoon season. It starts pouring outside as Hendery is on his way to Yukhei’s, and soon, his ankle socks are wet, and the water still seeps into his toes even when he carefully avoids puddles in the safety of the sidewalk, away from vehicles.

It’s Ten who’s standing behind the grilles at the front door, holding it open. “Hey,” he says, because Ten will always try something, anything, first.

“Hey,” Hendery exhales, his breath stuttering and he tries not to shiver as he folds close his umbrella.

When Ten hands over a small towel that Kun throws at him, Hendery blurts out the first thing that really bothers him: “It’s been three weeks, and twenty hours, since we’ve last spoken. And I’m sorry,” he finishes.

Ten’s thin shoulders deflate and his mouth pressed into a thin line parts in mild surprise. “Well, you _should_ be counting,” he jokes; all Hendery can see at this point, is how Ten is smiling at him through the reflection in the bathroom mirror, as Hendery pats his now clean bare feet dry and slips into guest slippers that Yukhei pulled out.

“I hate having to count, you know that,” Hendery mutters. His own reflection is a scared baby deer; his eyes are so big next to Ten’s narrow cat-like gaze.

“Then don’t. Don’t count what makes you sad,” Ten says simply.

Hendery could kick himself for how many missed calls and texts he’s ignored from Ten the past three weeks, and twenty hours. The numbers are blurred, because they’re both here and he can’t ignore Ten now. He could never, for long.

He wills himself not to count the seconds that pass as they look at each others’ reflections in the mirror, Ten standing behind him, dark eyes piercing and searching.

“Yeah. Okay,” Hendery says softly. His heart thuds in his chest, but it’s the good kind. “Okay,” he breathes again.

When Hendery turns around to face him, he can’t help but smile wide at the way Ten’s eyes glimmer.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ty for reading! comments are appreciated ❤️  
> thank you to crackle ⭐️ for being my beta! 
> 
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> [twitter acc](https://twitter.com/fractalkiss)  
> [cc](https://curiouscat.me/fractalkkiss)


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